Who is better for Tesla?

Donald Trump

Hillary Clinton

Forget everything else (This is TMC)...I just merely want to know which candidate will allow Elon to reach his goal?

Don't want this to become a political debate on other issues (emails, wall, etc...) Lets just focus on who will allow Tesla to sell directly to customers, more EV incentives and infrastructure, etc....

Neither of them cares about EVs in the slightest, so there is no explicit for/against here.

Clinton tends to favor established players in general, and Democrats tend to favor unions, so if we ever got into a serious fight between GM and Tesla, it's reasonable to expect that Clinton would side with GM.

Trump tends to favor American over foreign manufacturing, so if a Chinese upstart became a serious threat to Tesla, it's reasonable to expect that Trump would side with Tesla.

Beyond those two scenarios, there isn't much evidence one way or the other.

All Trump brand products have been manufactured overseas. I don't see any rational basis to the claim that Trump favors American manufacturing. "Make America great again" is a slogan, not a track record.

At the absolute worst Clinton will be no change from where we are now, though she has been talking about accelerating renewable energy sources. Whether we get any change or not is going to be very dependent on how much Congress fights her. We did learn from the 2008 campaign that she and Obama are very close on policy positions, the primary fight then was a lot more about character than policy. So you can expect her to be pretty similar to Obama on energy policy.

Obama's time in office has seen a lot of American oil come online, but that was in development many years before he ever came into office. The first play in North Dakota was developed in 2006. The federal EV tax credit was passed in 2008, but Obama had gotten incentives through to help develop alternative energy and alternative energy vehicles.

Ultimately Donald Trump is an absolute crap shoot. There has been indication that he would let Mike Pence actually run the country while he directs the workmen to put gold leaf on the White House or something. It is clear he would be bringing in a lot of Republican appointees from the GW Bush administration which was very pro-oil and anti alternative energy.

A large new oil discovery was made on the North Slope of Alaska last week. I'm sure the Republicans would like to see that brought online as fast as possible. "Drill, baby drill!"

Yeah, I think it's a moot point. Would take a seismic shift to get away from status quo.

No matter which candidate wins, Congress will be opposed to them. Clinton because she's a Democrat; Trump because many Republicans have jumped off his ship and intend to oppose him. However, as history has shown a "do nothing Congress" tends to be best for our economy. So at least we'll have that going for us. Which is nice.

In addition to the auto industry bail out, President Obama's administration supported Tesla. As you may remember from previous debates, Republicans tried to criticize him for it. I don't believe a Clinton administration would significantly change their stance.

So traditionally, that would stand to reason that the Republican candidate would be more "anti" than the Democratic counterpart. But... Trump has shown he's throwing all the conventional wisdom in the trash. So who knows.

Trying to be as objective as possible, I think that the chances of some cataclysmic event that negatively affects the economy is much greater with Trump (even if it's 0.1% versus 1%). So to the extent that avoiding economic uncertainty is good for Tesla, Hillary is better.

Trying to be as objective as possible, I think that the chances of some cataclysmic event that negatively affects the economy is much greater with Trump (even if it's 0.1% versus 1%). So to the extent that avoiding economic uncertainty is good for Tesla, Hillary is better.

Click to expand...

For Tesla Motors, it all depends on how much effect unionization would have, and how indebted the DNC is to UAW.

Trump has no voting record. The best one can do is to look at Trump's vice-presidential candidate, Mike Pence. I found a website with candidate voting records that seems reasonably unbiased, and you can see how Pence has voted on energy and environmental issues here.

There was a question on energy policy at the debate last night and Trump is strongly against the current push to clean energy and renewables that has hurt the coal industry and called for a return to coal.

I don't know if that would be financially worse for Tesla as a company than any other choice, but it does seem worse for Musk's and Tesla's vision for the future of energy.

That said, I'm not entirely sure he's being completely honest in that statement, either. When talking on this issue he often says he's a "free market guy", but one reason coal is currently in decline is because of substantial price pressure from natural gas, another non-renewable. And a huge number of the coal mining jobs were lost due to mechanization of the mining process.

Obama's policies have been part of what permitted Tesla to thrive in the past few years, and Clinton claims more of the same, so of the two options provided in the poll Hillary seems like the safe bet.

Setting aside my partisan leanings, I'd have to say it's Clinton, no contest. As has been pointed out, she's pro-renewables, yes, but more than anything she's the only one running that pro-renewable, anti-climate change voters can have any leverage over because 1) part of her big jobs push is from American-made renewable products and 2) dealing with climate change and environmental issues in general is a core issue in a least a few of her key voting blocs needed for election, congress and reelection (Ethnic minorities who suffer from environmental issues (EX: Flint, MI) , Millenials/Young GenXers and women who think about the future of their children's planet). Her political success, far more than her husbands, comes mainly from a coalition of people far more likely to support electric cars and the shift away from fossil fuels. So for her, pushing success of companies like Tesla ends up being 'red meat' to her 'base'. This is a good thing.